Expect friends, family, and loved ones to scold him repeatedly on this risk-hogging behavior, and villains to use Flaw Exploitation to make the most of it by engineering threats. If it's that kind of show, expect an episode or two about how the hero needs to learn to trust his teammates, and realize he can't control fate and protect them from all harm.

Occasionally, such a character may be a member of a Martyrdom Culture for whom death is not necessarily a bad thing, potentially resulting in misunderstandings when dealing with those with different backgrounds.

Examples

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Anime & Manga

Umi and Fuu (well, mostly Umi) in Magic Knight Rayearth are constantly yelling at Hikaru for this. She wants to intercept every attack and scout for danger on her own rather than in a group, and will always insist she's fine when she is not.

And Usagi, though her non-causes were often more dire. The other senshi repeatedly call her out for offering herself or the crystal to the enemies for the other soldiers' lives.

Watanuki from XXX Holic has more than a few elements of this, though it is brought up eventually, and even more eventually justified into a backstory-defining plot point. As early as volume 8 of the Manga, he offers to give up his left eye to a spider demon if she'll release a friend, the Zashiki-Warashi, who was trying to recover his stolen right eye, leading to the monster deconstructing this trope and giving him an epiphany.

Jorō-gumo: [...] The Zashiki-Warashi went to these lengths to get back your right eye, and you'd throw that away like it was nothing?... In other words, you consider her an absolute fool who would try to protect worthless trash such as yourself. Watanuki: That isn't it!! Jorō-gumo: It is it. [...] You hold in disgust those who would hurt others... and yet you do it yourself. Looking at the scars you've allowed to be inflicted on yourself, I can't imagine the amount of scars your actions have inflicted on others. Jorō-gumo: It's that particular attitude... that I just loathe.

In the case of Shiryu, it is hard to tell if that's a bad trait of him; he seems to become more powerful/skilled whenever he starts getting disadvantages, like being blinded or losing his armor off (though in Saint Seiya universe, warriors can still be a deadly threat as long as they are alive, and losing perceptions ACTUALLY allows reaching enlightenment, as Virgo Shaka vs Ikki lampshades). There's even a running-gag between fans that say "if Shiryu isn't blind or naked, the battle isn't done yet". Hell, he only managed to perform Excalibur the first time after his enemy pointed out he was hiding behind his resurrected Bronze Cloth (with protective ability nearly on par with Gold Cloths), and him accepting that he was unconsciously relying on his armor to protect him, and consequently casting it off. He was too immature (this gets lampshaded at several times in the series, too) at this point to channel his full power normally, so he HAD to put himself in a truly desperate situation, to bring out the power level necessary to activate Excalibur. He has to become a Martyr to get the proper motivation.

Averted with Athena, who puts her life on risk while fully knowing that the Saints will fight for her sake and the worlds. They're the one who fight her battles, but it's thanks to her that they even have time and chance to do that too.

Kurt Godel may be one of these too. According to Nodoka's artifact, he himself was not involved in the attack on Negi's village, however Godel says that he has no intention of running from his sins and promises, once everything is over, to let Negi beat him to death if that's what it takes to satisfy Negi's desire for revenge.'

Considering that Pain was slaughtering everyone, Red Shirts and Heroes alike, and that Naruto was literally the only one who had a chance of beating him, it is understandable for all of those other characters that Can't Catch Up to get the heck out of the way. Martyr Without a Cause would have been if he submited to Pain for Pain's twisted idea of Peace.

Naruto later gets called out on this behavior by Itachi, of all people, who points out that trying to do everything by himself is disrespectful to his friends, and that it's egotistical to think that only he can solve all the world's problems.

Chrono from Chrono Crusadeconstantly feels the need to do this. Almost every time there's an attack on his group, he'll push away his comrades and jump in front of the attack. Arguably this is justified since Chrono is a demon with the ability to heal himself, but he still seems almost ridiculously obsessed with being the only one to take any damage.

Nagi Kirima from the Boogiepop Series sees herself as a vigilante meant to clean up the world, and often goes to great lengths to deal with things herself. At one point she even temporarily gets killed by Manticore but Echoes' intervention saves her life. Notably, in her backstory her dying father's request for her was that she not be normal, and she seems to have taken it to heart (perhaps a bit too much).

Miaka from Fushigi Yuugi does this every single time she and her friends are attacked. "This is all because of me!"

Vash The Stampede takes this to ludicrous levels. His body is covered with scars he's suffered while protecting others — including his enemies. He'd rather die than allow ANYONE around him to get killed, and the people who are shooting at him are not exempt from that. Good thing his Improbable Aiming Skills are just as overpowered as his morals...

In a rare subversion of the trope, both his Improbable Aiming Skillsand his near-immortality are completely justified by the story.

When finally, near the end of the series run, he's forced to choose between killing an enemy or letting the two girls he has befriended (and he might well be in love with one of them) die instead, he pulls the trigger, kills the guy, and saves the girls — and then promptly breaks down crying.

Dai-Guard: Akagi Shunsuke's salaryman ethos extends to piloting Dai-Guard: during the competition with Kokubogar, he's the only one even trying despite being delirious with fever. He's also willing to tear his robot apart for impromptu "rocket punches" when nothing else seems to be working.

In Pandora Hearts, the fact that he cares nothing for himself is both Oz's strength and weakness. Hell The Abyss holds no fear to one who doesn't give a damn what happens to himself.

In Princess Tutu, Mytho is a prince from a fairytale that destroyed his own heart to seal away an evil raven. Because of his heart being missing, he's emotionless, but one key part of his personality remained intact—his desire to protect others. Because of this, he mindlessly throws himself into danger in order to protect anything and everyone: jumping out of a window to protect a baby bird (which can fly, by the way), running into a burning building to save a bird in a cage, throwing himself in front of a little girl in danger... for the people that care for him, it's one of the things that makes them love him, but many of them also express frustration with it.

Baccano!'s Jacuzzi Splot has regularly demonstrated that he is willing to risk (or even hand over) his life for someone he's known for hours at most. His Victorious Childhood Friend has this to say about it, "He comes out on the losing end a lot but he's got a lot of friends."

In Bakemonogatari, Koyomi Araragi's defining flaw is a hidden lack of self worth, which leads him to always try to sacrifice himself, even when he doesn't have to or it would even make things worse.

In Kizumonogatari, the chronologically first story, he becomes a vampire because he knowingly chose to die for a complete stranger simply because he believes it's a virtue to die for someone else. It only occurred to him much later that vampires eat people and what he did was insane. His first instinct is to try to die again.

When it comes to Hanekawa's issues, before he thinks of anything else, he comes up with a plan that depends on her ripping him in two and accidentally touching the sword he hid inside his body. It works, but nearly gets her killed and requires someone else to bail them both out. Even if it had worked, he completely fails to realize the effect his death would have everyone.

For Kanbaru Suruga, he goes into a fight he has no real chance of winning believing that if he just dies everyone else will be happy. He survives, but in the process he convinces her that deep down she's a murderer who only avoided killing someone because of blind luck, which leaves her mentally scarred for some time.

In the end, it's when he averts this trope that he has the greatest success with helping people: He brought Senjogahara to a genuine specialist, he decided to risk his life for his sister because he genuinely loves her and does not care that she's some kind of body hopping parasite spirit and when he chose to talk things out with a con man rather than doing anything stupid.

Allen Walker in D.Gray-Man wants to save everyone. He usually forgets in the process that he's one of only about 20 Exorcists fighting off millions of Akuma. At one point his friend Lenalee had to Bright Slap him to get him to act remotely rational about it.

Touma of A Certain Magical Index. He helps anyone who comes to him with trouble, and inevitably ends up in the hospital after helping. He even helps his enemies, refusing to hold grudges against people who tried to violently murder him and his friends for no good reason. He's also completely unaware that this tendency lands him lots of powerful friends (not to mention dozens of admirers). It comes to a head in the Magic God Othinus arc, where it turns out he feels he has so little self-worth that when Othinus alters reality so the world is perfect and everybody else is safe and happy, and all he has to do is die, he agrees. It takes The Will of the Misaka Network interfering and telling him he deserves to live as well for him to fight back.

Ash from Pokémon has a major habit of doing this as one of his first options rather than a last resort, usually to protect pokemon. Examples include, but are in no way limited to: throwing himself between the death blows of Mew and Mewtwo to stop the life-threatening fighting going on between all the pokemon in the ring; trying to make his pokemon go into their balls to protect them from the cold while stranded in a blizzard and leave him to freeze to death outside without the protection of their body heat; and leaping off the roof of a skyscraper after Pikachu is knocked off it, catching Pikachu in mid-air, and then trying to put himself beneath Pikachu to shield him from the impact with the ground. In skirmishes outside of formal battles, he will also often block attacks on his pokemon with his own body, even though pokemon are almost invariably tougher and less hurt by physical attacks than humans are.

In Pokémon Special, Team Galactic once trying to kidnap Platinum aside, Pearl tells Diamond that there's no reason to put themselves in danger by being involved with them after Diamond nearly gets himself killed stealing a camera from Cyrus. Diamond states that he refuses to standby and do nothing when there's an obviously evil and dangerous group running around.

In Double Arts, the apparently cheerful and playful Sister Heine turns out to be one of these. She gave up all her hobbies and became determined to keep healing people until it killed her, to atone for arriving too late to save a Troi-infected patient, even ignoring the advice of her superior Sisters to slow down.

It's all right to lose out with love and warm feelings, Ken. Nice people live perfectly happy that way.

Detective Conan's Ai Haibara will repeatedly put herself in harm's way if she feels it will protect someone she cares for. Early on, she was prepared to remain on an exploding bus because she felt she was endangering those around her because of the organization hunting her. Character Development helps with the worst of this but still shows itself when, during the Mystery Train arc, she is so confident she will die she resolves to do so only after temporarily undoing her Fountain of Youth so her grade school friends won't kick up enough of a fuss at her death to catch the organization's eye.

Comics

Legion of Super-Heroes's post-Zero Hour continuity gave Leviathan (Colossal Boy) something of this mentality, resulting in tragedy when Shrinking Violet attempts to use the Emerald Eye of Ekron to give her teammates their "hearts' desires". Leviathan's heart's desire turns out to be "to die a hero".

Interestingly, the Avengers film makes this part of his Character Development: Captain America initially calls him out on his un-willingness to sacrifice himself (while Stark claims he can always Take a Third Option), making his (almost) sacrifice to save the city from a nuke at the end a pretty big turning point for him.

Cable. He made himself a giant target to prove to the world that things could be better if everyone put aside their differences and worked together— to kill him. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling Deadpool and his pesky insanity! (Well, the dying part anyway.)

It seems that, following the ending of Avengers vs. X-Men, Cyclops seeks to be this way. Why? Because he wants to be the martyr for the reborn mutant race

This is actually a symptom of a personality disorder known as Primus apotheosis in the The Transformers (IDW). The affected individual ends up idolizing Optimus Primeway too much and instead of being merely willing to risk their lives for the sake of others in need, as Prime would, they go out of their way to find even the most minor of 'noble sacrifices' which would cost them their lives. This problem is widespread enough to affect 1 in every 50 Autobots (and the occasional Decepticon).

Fan Works

This is an extremely common quality for the lead character in Peggy Sue fanfics, due to the very nature of a Peggy Sue. Knowing that their True Companions have failed once before, they insist on going it alone to protect them and conceal their knowledge. They do this even though the knowledge they possess makes them the least expendable, as their death will likely seal everyone's fate.

Averted in A Very Potter Musical: As in the original Harry Potter, Voldemort asks Harry whom he will be using as a human shield this time. Harry has already told everyone not to interfere, but Ron steps forward to volunteer before Hermione yanks him back.

Escape from The Hokage's Hat: Naruto natch. Due to his crappy childhood, No Social Skills and Chronic Hero Syndrome the kid is so messed up he feels the need to save EVERYONE and being unable to do so means he's useless (in his mind). When Hinata calls him on this and points out she protects him because she WANTS to and Shizune says they care and are trying to fight with him not for him, he has a hard time processing these facts because he doesn't consider himself worth it.

Films

In the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the hero Will Turner seemed to have a curiously puppyish eagerness to sacrifice himself if that was at all likely to help matters. Jack even congratulates him as their fortunes take a dire turn, "And you get to die for Elizabeth...!"

In Secondhand Lions, Hub McCann expresses little interest in waiting to die of old age, and it is strongly implied that he possesses a severe death wish, as his only love died years before while giving birth. However, he is old and retired to a ranch with his brother, and those impulses cause him to risk his life for no reason. Eventually he gets his wish, dying with his brother in a reckless plane crash.

In Letters from Iwo Jima, the main (Japanese) characters' platoon is ordered to fall back and fortify another position after the American troops have broken through the first line of defense. Their Lieutenant disobeys and orders his men to take their own lives instead. The main characters refuse and instead fall back, reasoning that it makes sense to go down fighting rather than kill themselves pointlessly, especially since those were their orders anyway. This was because of the heavy tradition of honor in the Japanese military. Although suicide to avoid dishonor was a respected gesture, any general worth his salt would consider it a waste to make his officers commit suicide for their failures - however much of a good incentive for avoiding failure it may be.

Red Planet seems to have a spaceship full of people only too happy to sacrifice themselves for no apparent reason. You'd think NASA would pick astronauts who wanted to, you know, come back.

Played for Laughs with Forrest Gump's lieutenant. One of Lieutenant Dan's relatives died in each war since the American Revolution and he wants to live up to that. He doesn't. Die, that is. When he meets Forrest again after the war he's extremely bitter about it, though he eventually gets better. Although, in the original book's sequel Gump and Co., he gets killed by friendly fire in the first Gulf War.

Steve Rogers has quite a bit of this in Captain America: The First Avenger, desperate to join the army because he can't stand the idea of not risking his life along with other soldiers (even though he was rejected 4F for a laundry list of perfectly valid health reasons) and diving on a (dud, but he didn't know that) grenade to protect his squad when it wasn't exactly out of the question to just flee along with everyone else. However, it's explicitly pointed out by Bucky, who sarcastically remarks "sure, you have nothing to prove" that he takes stupid risks and it's partly because Steve has self-worth issues due to his frailness.

Taken further in the sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where he tells Agent Hill to blow up the helicarrier with him in it, and making no attempt to even try to escape. And let's not forget that he is perfectly willing to die by the Winter Soldier's hands once millions of lives are no longer in jeopardy.

In Avengers: Age of Ultron, this is outright discussed as Captain America's Fatal Flaw. For all his heroism and valor, he feels he needs to be fighting for something in order for his life to have meaning. Tony Stark even accuses him of opposing peacekeeping initiatives such as Insight, Ultron and the Vision out of fear they'll render him obsolete (though in fairness to Cap, he ended up being right about the first two).

Jean Grey in X2: X-Men United, who sacrifices herself while holding back a giant wall of water to allow the rest of the team time to escape. There were at least three other team members (Storm, Iceman, and Nightcrawler) with powers that would have been useful in this situation, and with all four of them working together, they at least stood a chance of getting everyone out alive. She never gave them the chance to try. In the original script she just does it from inside the jet.

Literature

Harry Potter has elements of this, sometimes exasperating his friends.

Making it worse is that Voldemort quickly figures that out. In one of the few times he shows any savvy, he uses Harry's willingness to rescue loved ones by sending fake memories of capturing Sirius Black in Order of the Phoenix. By the time of The Deathly Hallows, Voldemort accuses Harry of letting others die protecting him in order to guilt-trip Harry into sacrificing himself during the Battle of Hogwarts.

All Tamora Pierce heroines have this as a defining quality, to the exasperation of their various comrades.

So far, none have succeeded.

In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, Rand al'Thor suffers badly from this, at least if it's a woman on the line. He wangsts on endlessly if even a single woman is killed and he is sort of to blame — regardless of whether said woman was trying to kill him and everyone else around him. This is much to the reader's chagrin, since most women in Wheel of Time are jerkasseswhom no reader would miss.

Much of this is due to Rand's growing insanity over the course of the series; once he clears that up, he stops discriminating by sex and becomes much more pragmatic, although he still insists on focusing as much risk onto himself as possible to keep others safe. It isn't until Egwene's dying spirit convinces him that this is selfish that he finally relents.

Bella in Twilight is a variant—it's not that she wants to be a hero, it's that, as other characters sometimes lampshade, she blames herself for anything and everything that goes wrong. This leads to the same type of self-hatred (if not the same quantity) as The Atoner, and while she doesn't often have the opportunity to risk her life, she clearly considers herself more expendable than those around her, particularly Edward, but also her mother, father, unborn baby...

The title character from Percy Jackson and the Olympians does have the tendency to put the deaths of his friends right on his own head. In fact, he's explicitly told that is his fatal flaw, that he will always do anything to save a friend. Percy doesn't get how that's a flaw.

Timuscor of Spells, Swords, & Stealth desires above all else to be a paladin and strives to live as one would, even if no gods will accept him as theirs. To this end, he is very quick to risk or even sacrifice his life for the greater good or to protect his friends, as he views the act of Heroic Sacrifice the highest calling of a paladin. In the third book, it is implied that he may yet have hope for becoming a paladin, but not before he realizes this isn't the way to go about it.

Live Action TV

Buffyverse: Angel. If there's no evil around to throw himself in front of protecting innocents, he will either run out and find some more or he will wind up defending lesser evils while tormenting himself for doing so. It's a complex.

The three Winchesters in Supernatural are all quite prone to this. It's even gotten to the point where when one dies, another family member will make a Deal with the Devil (and they know they'll pay a high price) to bring them back to life. The Yellow Eyed Demon even comments that they make it "too easy". In all three cases, however, the motivation hovered somewhere between this and that of the Death Seeker — (Sam's death-wish stemmed from the loss of his girlfriend, John's from the loss of his wife and the realization of the damage he'd done to his sons, and Dean's from... oh, everything.)

Dean is particularly gifted in this area. In Faith, he willingly doesn't fight back against a Reaper who came to kill him in exchange for another (because he thinks she deserves to live more) and then seems disappointed and upset when the Reaper is stopped, he tries to sacrifice himself to stall the Seven Sins in 3x01 (much to Sam and Bobby's displeasure), deliberately uses himself for bait to catch the MotW's attention, and so on. All of the Winchesters run the fine line between this and the Deathseeker but Dean's is even finer than most.

Castiel displayed this as well through his whole stay on the show, made worse the more he sees himself as expandable and thinks risking his life, dying, Being possessed by Lucifer on season 11 are the only ways to help and make himself worthy because he is not as powerful as he used to be after metatron took his grace and damaged it. On season 12 He deemed that giving the Winchesters 3 minutes of distracting Lucifer by offering himself to be beaten up then killed is a fair enough sacrifice.

Doctor Who: The Doctor is known to get so passionate so as to put himself right in the face of death to save someone or something he cares about, be it a group of people he's barely met or one of his companions.

The Tenth Doctor does this the most, daring the Daleks to go ahead and kill him in Evolution of the Daleks after they impassively murder a man who made an honest heartfelt plead for mercy. He also does this in The Poison Sky, when he is prepared to destroy an entire Sontaran Fleet, which is about ready to end all human life. But being so determined to give his enemies a chance to make a better choice, he insists that he goes up with the bomb to give the Sontarans a chance to surrender.

This fact is even addressed in a Fourth Series episode, "Turn Left", where the Doctor dies before he can regenerate. Earth is then pretty much shot to hell, the Torchwood team all dies, and various other happenings occur that weren't supposed to.

The episodes does show the Earth could survive without the Doctor for a while, but only because he was able to teach former companions what they needed to know to save the world. Even then the world took substantial damage before it finally ended.

The Doctor's tendency to do this is parodied in one of the comic strips, wherein in order to defeat the monster he steals a helicopter equipped with canisters of nerve gas and plans to make a suicide crash-run into the beast itself. After his farewell speech to his friends, one of his friends points out that the helicopter comes equipped with an ejector seat, which he then sheepishly uses.

There are MANY instances of this in the classic series as well, though the most egregious might be in "Mawdryn Undead" when he's willing to sacrifice his life so the villains can succeed in their plan (which happens to be their own deaths), in order to save two companions from extreme aging/de-aging (depending on which direction through time the TARDIS travels). Luckily the Brigadier touches himself (not in THAT way)...

Zhaan does this in an episode of Farscape. Somebody had to activate the separate-the-ships sequence, so of course the one person too weak to even bother trying to cross back into Moya is the one they choose to do it. Given the twenty-minute before-death speech, why couldn't they just get a ten-foot pole and press the buttons from across the room?

Because the writers needed to find a way to write Zhaan out of the series, due to the fact that her actress's health was being severely damaged by all the blue body paint she had to wear. You'll note that in the season leading up to her death, Zhaan tended more and more towards full-body clothing whereas in the first season she'd been seen mostly (sometimes entirely) naked. Virginia Hey's kidneys were reacting startlingly badly to something in her makeup. One might call it Executive Meddling, if one considers her doctor to be an executive. In any case, the character was already dying, so, as she reasoned, why risk anyone else's life if she was going to be dead in a few weeks at most anyway.

Delenn's willingness to sacrifice herself at the drop of a hat is one of her defining characteristics.

Paradoxically, it was Delenn's willingness to die that saved her and Sheridan from the Vorlon's inquisitor. He expected Delenn to simply be another "I'm the one to do this because I was born for a special destiny"; instead she flatly states that she's just doing what she can in the circumstances she's in, and it doesn't matter if she dies in the process (and even if she fails miserably) because someone else will just step up and take her place. Turns out the Vorlons were more interested in making sure they had a cause than a hero/martyr.

Sheppard: It's not like it's the first time. How many suicide missions have I flown? McKay: I don't know. I lost count.

Jack from Lost always insists on personally going on the most dangerous missions, despite being the doctor and unofficial leader of the survivors, and thus arguably the most indispensible one. He especially insists that Kate never ever risk her life by coming on these missions, despite the fact that she's handy with a gun and a skilled tracker.

Malcom Reed on Star Trek: Enterprise is obsessed with dying heroically, moereso than other security chiefs in Starfleet. He apparently got this from an great-uncle in the Royal Navy who sealed himself in the engine compartment of his crippled nuclear submarine to allow the rest of his shipmates to escape.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Faith is a firm believer in redemption by death, particularly in Angel. It comes to a head in "Orpheus" where its revealed she was a little too willing to go along with Wesley's dangerous plan.

One episode of This Is Wonderland involved an ex-cop, played by Ron White, who was caught in a self-destructive cycle after someone shot a gun at his face. The gun didn't go off, but he seems to have felt that it should have.

Kryten of Red Dwarf is practically made of this trope. Whenever danger threatens he offers to kill himself and save the crew, this being the only logical solution. (Such as suggesting he be loaded into the reverse-thrust tubes so that his body be used as decoy fodder for a pursuing spacecraft.) Rimmer will then agree immediately.

Lister: Sit down, Kryten! I'm not doing me own smeggin' laundry...

Stefan from The Vampire Diaries fits this trope. He constantly offers himself up to be sacrificed in the place of others or puts himself in the most dangerous situations in order to protect others from getting hurt or killed.

Elena as well. She wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice herself in order to protect the people she loves.

Bonnie could also classify as well. She often puts her life in the line of fire for everyone.

Tabletop Games

Mage: The Awakening has a Legacy called the Tamers of Void, who train themselves to be martyrs, then spend the rest of their lives looking for a cause to die for. If they become powerful enough and are still alive, they can get the ability to bring someone back to life, in exchange for their own death.

The old World of Darkness game, Hunter: the Reckoning, has the aptly-named Martyr creed. Their abilities all aid others at the cost of damage to themselves, and they tend to be pretty short-lived because of it. The book mentions that at least some Martyrs, if not all of them, have egotistical ideas of martyrdom, and it isn't fighting the good fight or the salvation of mankind that drives them, as much as it is the desire for sympathy, attention, and praise; they tend to make good vehicles for the deconstruction of Mary Sue tropes.

Theater

Cyrano de Bergerac: This trope is Lampshaded, Deconstructed and justified with Cyrano. Lampshaded by Le Bret when Cyrano fights against one hundred men when all Ligniere asked was to sleep at his house. Later, Cyrano will rescue De Guiche's white scarf from enemy lines… just so he can boast to De Guiche. Cyrano is badass enough to survive and win, but then the play deconstructs this trope showing how this attitude arises not only in perilous situations, but in all aspects of the life of a person: Cyrano throws away every chance of glory or love he has. Le Bret continuously scolds Cyrano about this attitude. Cyrano simply says that he is trying to live without compromises, but the sad truth is that this trope is justified because Cyrano's attitude is the logical conclusion of a badass without any self esteem raised in a Martyrdom Culture.

Video Games

Lenna in Final Fantasy V will commit any act of self-poisoning or self-injury on herself in order to help dragons, even when it's unclear why hurting herself will help them. This is taken to extremes that even Bartz finds himself rolling his eyes about. Very late in the game, when obtaining the Phoenix Summon, the player will discover that this is caused by extreme guilt over an abortive attempt to kill the last dragon.

In Final Fantasy X, the resident Cid's first instinct when presented with any problem seems to be "catastrophically crash the airship into it". Other characters treat this with a mixture of humor and exasperation.

Rikku Lampshades this when they learns Guado and fiends have infiltrated the airship:

Cid: Fiends! There's nothin' to do but-

Rikku: (in a mock Cid-accent) -but to destroy the ship and all go down together! You gotta learn a little restraint, Pops.

All of Yevon is based on this. Not only do the martyrs' sacrifices not work, they give the local Eldritch Abomination a new host body.

Micaiah: No, I'm fine, really. I'm just confused... Is the goddess telling me that I'm not worthy to become a martyr for Daein? Pelleas: Or maybe she is saying that you're just too important to lose... But this is my fault! It was all because I signed that blood pact! I can only amend my mistake by giving my life!

It doesn't help that Micaiah's special ability is Sacrifice. She can take her own HP and transfer it to an ally. For a mage character with low HP and defense, this doesn't work too well...

In Fire Emblem Fates Azama accuses his potential girlfriend Effie of being this in their Revelation supports. It's not helped by how they met when she shielded him from a enemy attack so he has to heal her, and in their A support protects an enemy almost at the cost of her own life, after she realised he was a very young kid who had been borderline Forced into Evil.

One of the biggest strikes against Fallout 3 is that you inexplicably turn into one of these in the ending by going into an irradiated room, instead of sending in one of your radition-immune companions to do it instead.Broken Steel remedies this, in addition to adding a Playable Epilogue quest line (though choosing the option to let a radiation-immune character do the job is considered a cowardly option by the narrator rather than a practical one).

Subverted in Kingdom Hearts II, Axel will sacrifice himself during a cutscene to save you from hordes of Dusks, even though they aren't much of a threat and you could continue fighting for hours. This is a consequence of Gameplay and Story Segregation because all the characters act as though the nobody 'horde' was incredibly dangerous even though they're small fry as far as the player is concerned by that point.

In the second Shadow Hearts, Gepetto accuses Yuri Hyuga of being this.

Alicia of Valkyria Chronicles. As soon as she realizes she has a Suicide Attack up her sleeve, she goes and tries to put it to use against an enemy vehicle that she had almost crippled with a regular attack.

Visual Novels

Shirou Emiya of Fate/stay night, to an intentionally infuriating degree. Many characters call him out on this, and it comes back to bite him in more ways than simply being smeared across the pavement. Archer, and by extension Shirou himself, is a walking deconstruction of this trope, as is most clear in the Unlimited Blade Works route in the Visual Novel. The big reason this comes across as stupidity is because the first anime never explains Shirou's behaviour like UBW does; In one rather disturbing example, Shirou is stabbed in the arm, and he's more concerned that Rin is now covered in his blood than the fact that he's got a giant stab wound in his arm.

Web Comics

Rikk Oberf in Fans! has an obsession with ensuring that the people he cares for come to no harm in his adventures, and seems inclined to do this at times.

Torg of Sluggy Freelance will literally sacrifice himself at the first hint that any one of his friends might be in danger if he doesn't. This actually puts his teammates in a lot more danger because every time he tries this, they (duh!) have a mad scramble to rescue him. Then he yells at them for putting themselves in danger while he was trying to die, but is too stupid to take the hint that they're going to keep saving him. They're all messed up that way.

In Homestuck, after achieving God Tier, it's become a Running Gag that John repeatedly tries to sacrifice himself to save people on the basis that he's now immortal, even though he's repeatedly reminded that a Heroic Sacrifice would invalidate his immortality.

This was deconstructed in the text story Prime Spark, where, after dying in the show, Armada!Prime meets the ghosts of his Generation 1 and Beast Machines counterparts; both tell him that it's more important for a leader to lead his troops than to sacrifice himself for some perceived mistake.

To make it worse, here's how he "cheated": Megatron dodged one of his shots, which hit an opaque, featureless structure in the background. This structure happened to be a building in which some civilian models were. That's right! Despite winning and Megatron admitting defeat, Prime found out he accidentally hit some non-sentient non-people inside a video game, and that prompted him to forfeit for "cheating" and TEAR HIS OWN HEAD OFF IN FRONT OF EVERYONE.

It should be noted that the situation that inspired the page quote was an aversion. While Optimus was going to attempt a near-suicidal mission by ramming a Kill Sat with an exploding stasis pod, but he had every intention of bailing out before he could die. Megatron sabotages the pod, which turns this into an unintentional Heroic Sacrifice. (Don't worry, Optimus got better.)

In the Japanese exclusive series The Headmasters, Optimus sacrifices himself to bring a berserk Vector Sigma (the supercomputer at the heart of their home planet of Cybertron) back under control. Again, this situation was an aversion, as throughout the episode the Autobots are desperately trying to bring him the Matrix of Leadership so he won't have to use his own lifeforce (Optimus is Touched by Vorlons from carrying the Matrix for years, and so his lifeforce can act as a key to Vector Sigma). It unfortunately fails due to Decepticon interference: despite the Autobots successfully bringing him the Matrix, Vector Sigma begins to go nova before he can actually use it and Optimus is forced to sacrifice himself once again.

This is played with in the IDW comics. Optimus is a lot more pragmatic there (to the point where the destruction of planets during battles with Decepticons is chalked up as acceptable collateral damage), but is still prone to doing things like throwing himself at the biggest, baddest threat on the battlefield. It turns out that he was once a super cop and did that sort of thing anyway, since he really could handle just about any situation. When he's depressed or despondent (e.g. after the All Hail Megatron storyline) he acts like this, giving himself up to the humans in the hopes they'll forgive the other Cybertronians for the Decepticon invasion.

IDW Optimus is a lot better about this in the Death of Optimus Prime oneshot, where he symbolically dies (i.e. gives up the name Optimus Prime) so his Autobots can remain on a restored Cybertron while he is exiled for being a living symbol of the now-ended war. He takes his old name of Orion Pax and immediately begins wandering space, doing good wherever he can like a knight errant. He's actually quite happy, since he is no longer weighed down by the Chains Of Commanding.

In Code Lyoko, Aelita is always ready to sacrifice herself when the situation becomes too much to handle for the heroes. Somewhat justified in that, throughout seasons 1 and 2, she's the only reason Team Lyoko keeps the Supercomputer on instead of just cutting the juice to finish off XANA — and also, Aelita believes she's an artificial being and not a human. She actually makes the Heroic Sacrifice in the episode "Just in Time", although Jérémie manages to bring her back. Even after learning she's human after all, she still tries to cut off the Supercomputer in the season 2 finale "The Key".

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